Nathalie Brown catches up with world-renowned writer and storyteller Mona Williams, who will be in Dunedin and Oamaru at the weekend.
Exotic. Dynamic. Flamboyant. Bound to stand out in a crowd among the homogenously pale-faced populace of Wellington in the early 1970s.
Mona Williams: black and Jewish, an immigrant from the South American country of Guyana (formerly British Guyana), married a Kiwi and set about telling stories for a living.
Next Saturday at 1.15pm Williams will tell tales in the Dunningham Suite at the Dunedin City Library to raise funds for the city's Jewish congregation.
The following day she will perform in Oamaru for Transition Oamaru & Waitaki District, in support of the group's environmental and cultural sustainability programmes.
Shortly afterwards she will set out on a series of engagements in Australia before returning to take part in the Limmud, the Jewish arts festival to be held in Auckland on August 27 and 28.
Over the years she has performed to audiences of all ages and ranging from small school groups of 200 to some of the 35,000 who attended the 1999 Dunya Festival in Rotterdam, the world's biggest annual multicultural event.
In 1971, having been a Fulbright and Ford Foundation scholar at Stanford University in California, she armed herself with a degree in mass communications from that university, married a Kiwi and made New Zealand her home.
At first, while her two daughters were young, she drew on her own childhood in the lush and colourful Caribbean country and wrote stories for New Zealand's School Journal, the publication that incubated the talents of so many of this country's best-known writers.
Later she became a teacher and then established herself as a storyteller, travelling to schools and arts festivals throughout New Zealand and Australia, with occasional tours of British and European cultural festivals.
Her voice is deep and rich, accented with the distinctly English vowel sounds of her native country.
She draws on an impressive mastery of world literature and a fabulous personal heritage to build her repertoire of stories.
"My Jewishness underpins how I see the world. In many ways I see the world as a female as distinct from the world that was handed to me, which is very male. I see the world also as a descendant of slavery survivors because I'm of African descent. And that is a very different vision from the world I encounter in newspapers every day, which is very American and Eurocentric.
"I recently saw the movie You Before Me. where a young man who is paralysed except for two fingers makes a decision to end his life. Now I respond to that as a person of African descent, whose people lived through slavery, when the only thing that we had to preserve us was hope. And there was nothing that was so devastating that we gave up hope and said we wanted to die. If that were the case I wouldn't be here.
"And in the middle of the Holocaust, Jews hoped. And that's all they had: hope. Even though six million of those people went to the gas chambers and died. And for more than 60 million people of African descent over 350 years who were brutalised by the Portuguese and the Spanish, the French and the Dutch and the Belgians and the Danes, and the Americans and the British and the Scottish and all: what is there but hope?''
She explored some of these themes in her 1995 memoir, Bishops: My Turbulent Colonial Youth, which she serialised and read on Radio New Zealand National some years ago.
"I can't separate being Jewish and being me. Or separate being female and being me or separate being of African descent and being me. It's who I am. It's integral. It's inextricably woven into who I am.
"Just as when I was a schoolteacher here in New Zealand the May and August holidays were woven into my life, in exactly the same way the Jewish holidays are woven into my life. I can't function unless I have two calendars; one is Jewish and the other is secular. And it's not either/or. They're both part of my life.''
Williams says she develops her repertoire by reading voraciously "until one tale or one personality would affect me very deeply so I would learn the tale and tell it and tell it, and practise it for about three or four months before I feel right with it, before I could even begin to perform it''.
As for the Dunedin and Oamaru programmes next week, Williams says she likes to have the freedom to greet her audience and size them up before making the final decision.
"The repertoire [of stories] in my head would be about 80 that I can choose from. Knowing who my audience might be, I prepare the best 12 and in an evening maybe I'll tell four or five. The stories incorporate song, dance, audience participation and colourful costumes.
"The stories that enliven me are often Irish. I like the Irish hero tales like Finn MacCool. But I have autobiographical tales, I have wisdom tales, whodunnit tales and tales that come from the myths and legends, the folk tales, the fairy tales of different countries.
"From the Jewish tradition I love Isaac Basheva Singer because he's very witty with a straight face and I like Chaim Potok because he's brutally honest.''
Audiences can expect some of these stories in the Dunedin programme.
See her, hear her
• Mona Williams will perform in the Dunningham Suite, 4th floor Dunedin City Library, Saturday, July 30, 1.15pm-3.30pm
• In Oamaru at the Bedford School of Music on Sunday, July 31, at 3pm.
